SAN ANTONIO (NEXSTAR) — Two years before a Reddit community would come to dominate headlines, a Texas mother gave her son a gift for Kwanzaa – 10 shares of GameStop stock.
Nina Carr, of San Antonio, told the Houston Chronicle she gifted the shares, bought at $6 apiece, to her then 8-year-old son Jaydyn as part of Kwanzaa’s fourth principle of “cooperative economics,” Ujamaa.
Little did they know on December 30, 2019, a future war between retail stock traders trying to force the hand of hedge funds betting against GameStop would cause the share price to rocket upwards.
Carr told the paper that Jaydyn has been learning about building wealth alongside her, so when her phone started blowing up with watchlist alerts about GameStop, she recalled, “I was trying to explain to him that this was unusual, I asked him, ‘Do you want to stay or sell?’”
Jaydyn decided to sell the stock Wednesday evening at over 53 times the value his mother bought it at, cashing in his shares for a tidy $3,200.
Carr told the Chronicle that $2,200 will be deposited in his savings account while the rest will go to future investments.